“The next best thing to the enjoyment of a good time is the recollection of it.”
We’re two months in for the year and currently sitting around 1200 job losses in the gaming industry. A number that will only go higher, of course, as the year goes on.
This week, among other studios, we lost Monolith. I’ve got a lot of fond memories of Monolith games. There’s more to the list to add here that I didn’t even cover in the show. And maybe, hopefully, I’ll remember them for the next episode cause there’s a few I’d still like to discuss.
Around 2001 or 2002, I built my first PC. I did so with the single goal of playing Max Payne with mods. But, you know, that got the ball rolling. Back then, we didn’t have games at the click of our fingertips. You still needed to venture out to buy a box that had a disc that would go into a drive and install on your PC. What that means is that, for the most part, that’s all I played.
Until another game would release, and again, let me remind you of the year – we had gaps in games releasing that had any weight to them as being something to go out and pick up, at least on PC. And one of the few purchases made during this time was Tron 2.0 – a Monolith game.
What an amazing game that was so early on in my PC gaming life. It’s been forever since I’ve gone back to look at it on a video or whatever so I have no idea how it holds up but back then it was fantastic.
We’re going to miss a lot from this company and those people. Monolith didn’t just make a new game, that made an innovation to go along with it. From the enemies they scanned for their first game, Blood, back in 97, to the enemy AI used in FEAR, to the most recent and most innovative NEMESIS system used in Shadow Of Mordor/War – a system they were planning to implement in their Wonder Woman game, now cancelled.
I hope in time we hear of people from the studio getting jobs elsewhere or forming their own studio, if possible. I think there’s a lot more to be offered here from them and I hope, somehow, we’ll be able to see that come to fruition. For now, however, it’s just goodbye.
It’s hard to go from that back into my schtick for poking fun at Ubisoft. I still want my Splinter Cell game and I’ll still tell you it has been 4,212 days since a new Splinter Cell game (non-animated series or guest spot in another game franchise, remake, BBC radio drama, or VR exclusive) was released. But maybe now I’ll start also reminding you that there’s been 1200 job losses since January 1, 2025.
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